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The claim that "whatever you write in CLAUDE.md, Claude will follow" is doing a lot of heavy lifting. In practice CLAUDE.md is a suggestion, not a contract. Complex tasks and compaction will dilute the use of CLAUDE.md, especially once the context window runs out.

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This is correct. All of these .md files are just blobs of text that the LLM matches against. They might increase the likelihood of something happening or not happening.

They look to me like people actually want to build deterministic workflows, but blobs of text are the wrong approach for that. The right tool is code that controls the agent through specific states and validates the tool calls step by step.

That's not quite right. Claude treats certain md files very differently from others. See eg

https://claudefa.st/blog/guide/mechanics/claude-md-mastery

If true it is adding more weight. It is not infallable.

You can create a control loop that runs all tests and then runs a claude session to fix.

Ultimately you can't force claude to solve any problem but you could make it so constraints are kept.

A simple way is a git hook thay runs all the deterministic things you care about.

Yeah, the moment I saw this I knew this article was not going to be very useful.

Getting claude to follow your guidance files consistently is a bit maddening.

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